Not long ago I made the decision to move from regular work to freelancing. I knew from experience that success depends on my ability to generate a consistent flow of leads. But, I cannot afford to waste a lot of money in the process. I have no problem investing but getting a return on that investment is critical. When money is tight we have to spend time. This means making trade-offs between spending time and spending money.
Chris, thank you so very much for that. I am new to all of this and feel so overwhelmed in trying to figure out what system to use and how to put it all together. I have written 3 ebooks and have a course to go with one. One is a free give-away. I didn’t know where to start, but wanted to just do the free give-away in exchange for the emails. Later on, I thought I’d offer the course that goes with that book. What do you recommend? Do you think I should just stick with Leadpages and collect the emails and then when I’m ready to offer the course, use ClickFunnels? Can the names collected in LeadPages be integrated into ClickFunnels? I’m still trying to work this all out. Thanks for any help/guidance you can give.
Pinterest’s approach is different in that they don’t spend much time explaining what Pinterest is, since they can assume most people have already heard of them. Instead, a different example of Pinterest’s value is shown with each visit to the site, with a broader explanation of Pinterest (find and save all the things that inspire you) that sits below the main headline. What is Pinterest doing right here?
What I love most about the ClickFunnels software, is the drag and drop functionality. If you have any type of internet marketing experience, it’s much easier than using WordPress natively and you literally build the page as you are looking at it. No more “save it” and hit “preview” to see how it looks. WordPress is still what you should be using for content based websites, but ClickFunnels can make a powerful ally if you intend on selling membership programs or products to your customers that visit your website. The customization options are pretty much limitless when building out a proper marketing funnel.
OK, ok…that said, it may take you awhile to get acquainted and comfortable with all the Clickfunnels features — there are a lot of details you’ll have to figure out once your sales funnel is built. Things like what domain you’re going to assign it to (you can buy one for an easy $20 through Clickfunnels or attach it to an existing domain), your SEO data, if you’re going to integrate it with your email platform, creating split test pages, testing your live funnel, etc, etc.
Corporations and businesses are all looking for organic growth, to increase market share, effectively deal with low price competitors, increase closing averages, and retain top talent (SAP study shows that cost of losing your top sales person is 700K). The key is to do all this within a process that can be repeated and held accountable from the any position of the sales organization. The Sales Funnel can help you achieve these goals. Click here to learn more…
LeadPages is an online tool that you can use to collect email subscribers. That is the main function of LeadPages, and they provide tons of purdy templates that you can use for lead magnets, webinars, and landing pages in order to grow your email list. LeadPages also has templates for things like sales pages — it’s a very robust tool! I literally use it everyday.
Anyone can learn how to make a basic WordPress site without coding but if you need anything more elaborate or extensive for your business, it can get quite tricky. WordPress offers thousands of plugins for a reason, with thousands of themes to choose from before that. If you are a new business owner, never had an online presence, you should probably consult with a design team first (which could cost you).
Create eye catching headlines. Most good landing pages use the main headline to confirm the offer and use a sub heading for more explanation or value proposition (aka why your offer is awesome). An example might be, “Free Facebook Marketing Ebook (headline), Learn how to get more Facebook followers, likes, and engagement from our marketing gurus (sub heading).” You’ll see plenty of great landing page headlines in our examples below, and you’ll see that some invert this so that the value proposition is the headline.
“Bonus comment – there is a clear narrative that ‘we’ can help ‘you’ start your own business. I like that there is a lot of focus on the ‘you’ throughout the page. We could improve this further with the usage of ‘we’ to mean both the user and ConvertKit by about halfway through the page. It is a subtle reassurance that we are here for you and the user will feel the reassurance whether they are aware of it or not.”
The penultimate stage of the sales process is working out the fine details and establishing a commitment to the deal. Once the lead is ready to make a purchase, sales reps present proposal, terms of contract, and other agreements to successfully win their business. The outcome of the opportunity may sway either way— win or loss—depending on the prospect’s interests at this stage. Although sales reps set the table for success, when it comes to closing—win rates are quite unpredictable.
When a prospect converts on your first page, they can be segmented and directed to targeted pages to further drive them through your sales channel. They work because, well, contrary to what some inbound marketers believe - not every customer is ready and willing to buy from you or register for your event immediately after they’ve clicked on your PPC or social ad.
This means that you can recognize a LeadPage (Landing Page) from a mile away and when people (the normal non-internet marketers) start noticing the similarity between all these page designs it’ll be more obvious that people are trying to squeeze a lead out of them. Having said that, I’m confident the crew at LeadPages will be smart enough to adapt and start churning out more high-quality pages more often to give their users more variety.
ClickFunnels integrates with Stripe, Paypal, and other types of payment processors, making it extremely easy to integrate if you take payments online for your services. It also allows for custom code to be inserted pretty much anywhere in a given page, which allows for you to truly customize your landing page, and even provide other checkout options like PayPal for your customers. You can also provide different price points and pricing options for your customers, built right into the landing pages.
After linking the pages together, my funnel was ready to go. It took about two days to complete this funnel compared to a couple of hours on ClickFunnels. I am also worried about the security of my pages. I’m protecting these pages from search engine spiders. But, could someone with technical skill still uncover them? With ClickFunnels, I am more confident in the security of these pages.

The image above is a glimpse at one of my webinars that I created in LeadPages. I embedded my live webinar presentation into a webinar template in LeadPages and also added a chat box (not pictured) below the webinar so that attendees could communicate and ask questions. Webinar software can be very pricy, but this solution allows you to do them nearly for free by embedding a live Google Hangouts broadcast. LeadPages is a great option for anyone getting started with webinars.

Cons: They offer several paid levels but honestly, the paid or Free plan offer a limited package and all of them will funnel you to the main plan. . Now this is just for your funnel builder and not your hosting or CRM. For half the amount I can outsource and build landing funnels that I own. The main focus of this is for small business and solopreneurs. . Now it is if you can put the software to use and turn sales. But if you are just starting out this will kill the cash flow. Additionally. I found that a lot of creativity and design are needed. So be prepared that to make this work it takes time. I found it to be very time consuming and not the 5 minutes they claim.

That small PDF symbol over the feature image helps set expectations for what format the download will be in. The arrow in front of the subheadline helps further direct your attention to important copy they want visitors to read. Like IMPACT, they also have an auto-checked box to subscribe to their newsletter on their form -- which, if turned into an opt-in check box, is a great way to increase subscribers. All of these small, seemingly insignificant details help bring together a solid, admirable landing page design.

Yes. Inside the affiliate dashboard, we provide you with over a dozen different links for promoting free content, our homepage, pricing page, etc. We also send you links via email for even easier promotion to earn commissions. It's also easy to create your own links to any specific content of ours (such as a blog post for sharing on social media).

You can configure the lead scoring rules to match your ideal buyer persona by simply adding or subtracting points for the lead property. For example, if your business is purely local, then for a lead to become your customer the minimum criteria is to be within your service area. Add 20 points. If the lead doesn’t belong to an industry you serve, subtract 10 points. In addition to that, you can also customize scores for email, application and web activity. Bring everything together, and you have a list of hot, warm and cold leads in the sales funnel for your sales reps to focus and close more deals faster.
Wonder which option is best if I currently have only one product selling on Amazon (only, no e-comm on my own site)? I can see how Clickfunnels may be superior for up-selling, and “subscription” type sales, but if my product is one that perhaps my customer would by a few of for their own use and/or gifts, it strikes me that many of the advanced functions of Clickfunnels would be “wasted” on my current model. Appreciate any feedback on this.

Also known as click-through landing pages, nurturing visitors directly on your site is a more advanced marketing technique. They’re sort of a combination of lead generation and direct sales landing pages. Their purpose is to warm leads through a sales funnel directly on your site. They keep visitors clicking through and converting as you guide them through your on-site sales path. You don’t necessarily need a personalized, segmented email automation campaign you might implement with lead generation (or a dropped sales cart).

Muzzle, a mac app that silences on-screen notifications, fully embraces this show don't tell mentality on their otherwise minimal landing page. Visitors to the page are greeted with a rapid-fire onslaught of embarrassing notifications in the upper left of the screen. Not only is the animation hilarious, it also manages to compellingly convey the app's usefulness without lengthly descriptions.
Ease of Use You’ll have to learn a bit about online funnels in general, but software is easy to learn, there are a lot of resources to help you out. Great for non-coders, or non-techies. You will have to invest some serious time to learning how to use WordPress if you are a novice.You might also have to hire web designers depending on the type or function of your website.
Important Note: If you’re currently a ClickFunnels customer and considering upgrading to the Etison Suite – purchasing Funnel Hacks is a total no-brainer. With Funnel Hacks, you’ll get six months of the Etison Suite at a huge discount – along with a ton of other free resources. There is no reason to just upgrade your account to Etison Suite and pay full price!
Some online marketers may be counseled by a legal team to have multiple consent checkboxes for each of the means of communication they'll be contacting their subscribers (i.e. email, phone, direct mail). We only have one active-consent checkbox within Leadpages, however, you may be able to set up multiple custom field checkboxes in your ESP and add those to your Leadpages form.
Cons: There seems to be a lot of issues with their back end server infrastructure and cache updates. Elements and page orders, etc. do not always update as you expect them to, as well as their server systems have proven to be only about 90% reliable. Not a problem at low traffic volumes, but a huge issue for anyone driving thousands of users per hour to their sites. Support is also not that knowledgable or helpful, though they try their best.
Overall: I tried to use it for 6-8 months, I am located in Costa Rica (Central America), and there are a lot of restrictions mainly with currency. It looks like it works fine with the integration of Stripe because you can do upgrades, sidegrades and downgrades, however if I am not mistaken, it only works in USA. In my case, only Paypal works and is very limited.

They have already started mentioning big names in the Internet Marketing industry whose landing pages they have published to the marketplace which continue to build and expand LeadPages‘ authority. Some of these names include Ezra Firestone (Smart Marketer), James Schramko (Super Fast Business) and Ryan Deis s(Digital Marketing)….but no Russell Brunson 😛 (by the way, all those guys are killing it as of late, so kudos to them!)

Hi Willie. You make some very good points, and yes they are not exactly the same as ClickFunnels is capable of doing much more. I just put LeadPages (and Samcart) in there because they are both popular and there is some overlap with ClickFunnels (lead generation & checkout pages). So I just wanted to put them in for comparison purposes for people who might want just those specific capabilities, and not the whole kitchen sink that ClickFunnels provides.

Using Clickfunnels and taking advantage of Clickfunnels pricing, you can easily create a marketing funnel from scratch and include all the operational pieces needed to have a high converting funnel. In the "old days" of online business, you had to deal with website hosting, autoresponders, landing page vendors, amongst others just to have everything work in concert together.

When it comes to Backpack, you are definitely not short of useful marketing features either! Backpack, put simply, is a native application which is used for managing affiliate marketing processes. Backpack allows you to seamlessly integrate affiliate programs into sales funnels, giving you enhanced power and information. With Backpack, you can effectively view your affiliate progress, view your individual affiliate profile, assess your due payments, set up commission plans and tiers, and manage your affiliate funnels.
Take it one step further and break your marketing improvements down into stages. Perhaps your first stage of improvements is to enhance the conversion path on your website by offering a free eBook or free consultation to your site visitors. Once you feel confident that you can capture lead information, you might be ready to invest in additional marketing efforts to attract new visitors to your site.
As a software engineer myself, I can tell you that building funnels from an application standpoint takes massive amounts of work. There's a great deal of coding and integration that's required here. From email systems to landing page implementations to credit card processing APIs, and everything in between, so many platforms need to "talk," that it takes the bar too high for the average marketer.